Nancy Eshelman: A Piece of My Mind: Columns from The Patriot-News

Plenty of people have come up to me over the years and said, "You ought to write a book."

My response has always been to ask them to imagine they are a hairdresser. All day they work in a salon, cutting hair, coloring hair, styling hair. Now, I ask, "When you go home at night do you want to cut hair, color hair and style hair?"

The last thing I wanted to do after a long day in the newsroom was construct sentences, edit paragraphs and compile a manuscript.

Then one day I had an awakening. All those words I had been stringing together in columns in The Patriot-News since 1989 were just hanging around in a computer library. A few were clipped from newspapers and shoved in people's drawers. Some dangled from magnets on refrigerators. Why not gather a bunch of them together and create a book?

And so this work began taking shape.

What I have gathered here are columns written over the years about the joys and sorrows that come from caring about someone and about the changes I've observed as I've passed from child to adult, from daughter to mother to grandmother.